I don’t know if there’s much to DJing these days. Seems to me you just press a button on your laptop and suddenly you’re set for the night. You could probably not know anything about music, or indeed DJing, and with the aid of a Macbook and a pair of headphones, still manage to scrape your way through a club appearance or two. I’m using this example to draw an interesting parallel with Amazing Beat, the new, free iOS gaming app from Hadi Pintaro. Amazing Beat is a rhythm-based game which requires you to keep in time with a music track to build up your score. A good sense of rhythm then, is paramount. Or is it?
The unique selling point of Amazing Beat is that you can play it without paying the slightest bit of attention to the music. In fact, you could play it with the sound down. The mechanics of the game are straight forward enough; you are given a divided screen, one side designated for squares, the other for circles. Squares are blue, circles are pink. They fall into your screen from the top, and your job is to direct them to their correct side by tapping the screen. You can bash away in time with your selected music track, or you can play for speed and endurance and just hammer those babies home as soon as you’ve registered the colour and shape. It’s up to you how you play!
The interface and layout of the app are straightforward and perfectly functional. The tracks themselves are pretty catchy, a collection of five deliriously giddy electro pounders that’ll have you bopping the shapes away in time with the beat before you’ve even realised you’re doing it. However, while the concept of the game is easy to grasp, succeeding in it is quite another story. The shapes come thick and fast as the music progresses (there’s even one song that takes off like a runaway train from the get go), and it becomes quite the task to maintain the pace with the required precision.
Like many games of this genre, your best shot at a high score depends on you entering a sort of trance-like state where your world is comprised of only squares and circles. I’m a big fan of these types of co-ordination-based challenges, and Amazing Beat is a great example of an addictive, engaging little game with the unique twist of a killer soundtrack. But the beauty of it is, you can play it without the soundtrack too and happily lose yourself for an hour. Perfect for music aficionados or challenge seeking high-scorers, Amazing Beat is certainly one to beat and well worth checking out.
Get into rhythm at the iTunes Store by downloading this app for free.
